question about nas storage and mac/windows compatibility

[Lulzor1234]

I've been reading about nas storage like my cloud, personal cloud etc and i would like to know if mac and windows systems have full read/write access to such nas drives. My house has a mix of both and I was wondering if they can all use the same nas drive or do i have to get one for each system type, as I understand mac and windows use different file systems like htfs+ and ntfs.

 

[jsmithepa]

NAS is different from DAS (Direct Access Storage). A DAS would be like a USB drive you plug into your machine, and which case how the HD formatted matters. NAS OTOH is a self-containing storage mechanism, how the drives are actually formatted is not seen by the clients using it, and in that sense it's universally compatible. The NAS manual should spell out what format it recommends for a multi-plaform environment.

The better NAS use universally standard access protocol like SAMBA, which is built in into Windows and OSX. The cheaper ones they may force your to load a driver for each client, those you have to make sure they have the drivers for x86 as well as OSX.

 

[Lulzor1234]

okay thanks, so I can save mac and windows files simultaneously no problem. also just checking but is there any way to connect my nas to my pc? like if for some reason my router goes down and i need to access the files urgently. Is there a usb connection or something?

 

[jsmithepa]

usb connection or something?

Not sure about this one.

Those NAS boxes do have USB jacks but I don't know whether for administration purposes only or what. But no matter, even if can't use USB, in the highly unlikely event that your switch dies, all you have to do is to use a CAT5 crossover cable between PC and NAS, configure for static IP and they will talk to each other that way.

 

[Lulzor1234]

I see, thanks for all the help